You Canucks need some sunblock?

[Bricktop]

Getting hot in Canada, according to the Beeb.



https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47754189">//https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47754189



If you need advice on how to cope with severe heat just ask.

[Anonymous]

All bullshit. There is a post about it in another thread. This was released the same day by a government department the same day that Trudeau imposed his carbon tax on fou holdout provinces, including my own province of Saskatchewan.

[Bricktop]

Wait. You're accusing the BBC of fake news???



 

[Anonymous]

Wait. You're accusing the BBC of fake news???



 

The cabinet post of climate change that Justine's government created comes out with a scare em into buying his bullshit study the same day as his imposed national carbon tax. Justine is a fraudster.

[Bricktop]

He's no orphan.

[Anonymous]

All bullshit. There is a post about it in another thread. This was released the same day by a government department the same day that Trudeau imposed his carbon tax on four holdout provinces, including my own province of Saskatchewan.

He thinks we are stupid.

[Gaon]

Wait. You're accusing the BBC of fake news???



 

The cabinet post of climate change that Justine's government created comes out with a scare em into buying his bullshit study the same day as his imposed national carbon tax. Justine is a fraudster.

Aha.

[Anonymous]

All bullshit. There is a post about it in another thread. This was released the same day by a government department the same day that Trudeau imposed his carbon tax on four holdout provinces, including my own province of Saskatchewan.

He thinks we are stupid.

A lot of us are. He has a chance of being reelected.



Three days in and I am already sick of Trudeau's carbon tax.

[Anonymous]

Some people are so gullible and Trudeau is a con man.



By Lorrie Goldstein of Sun News Media



Same old doom and gloom

Climate change spin nothing new



If you're gullible enough to believe it was pure coincidence that a doomsday report by federal climate scientists on global warming was released on the same day Prime Minister Justin Trudeau imposed his carbon tax on four provinces, I have a proposition for you.



I would like to sell you some oceanfront property in Alberta caused by rising ocean levels due to global warming.



The report breathlessly warns Canada is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world.



But that's hardly surprising since Canada is a big, northern country and it's long been known warming is occurring faster at the North Pole and in the Arctic than anywhere else on Earth.



The report says the adverse impacts on Canada are "effectively irreversible" and will be felt for hundreds of years, even if Canada and the rest of the world succeeds in lowering industrial greenhouse gas emissions to avoid even worse warming.



Trudeau and Co. obviously wanted the release of this report on the same day (Monday) it imposed their new federal carbon tax on Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and New Brunswick, in order to portray everyone who opposes the tax as "climate deniers."



Except that effort was inadvertently bushwhacked on Tuesday when federal environment commissioner Julie Gelfand, in her final report, said the Trudeau government isn't doing enough to combat climate change and isn't on track to meet Trudeau's 2030 target of reducing Canada's industrial greenhouse gas emissions to 30% below 2005 levels.



This consistent with decades of failures by Liberal and Conservative governments to meet every emission target they've ever set.



Last year, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted humanity had just 12 years to avert catastrophic warming, while UN Secretary-general Antonio Guterres pegged it at two years to avert "runaway climate change."



This is nothing new.



It's called "climate porn", a phrase coined in 2006 by the United Kingdom's Institute for Public Policy and Research, a progressive think tank, to describe the alarmist rhetoric that permeates public discussion of climate change, following an extensive review of government and environmental websites and media coverage.



In their paper, Warm Words: How are we telling the climate change story and can we tell it better? authors Gill Ereaut and Nat Segnit concluded:



"Climate change is most commonly constructed through the alarmist repertoire — as awesome, terrible, immense and beyond human control ... It is typified by an inflated or extreme lexicon, incorporating an urgent tone and cinematic codes.



"It employs a quasi-religious register of death and doom, and it uses language of acceleration and irreversibility.



"The difficulty with it is that the scale of the problem as it is shown excludes the possibility of real action ... by the reader or viewer. It contains an implicit counsel of despair – 'the problem is just too big for us to take on.'"



It's also counter-productive because people simply don't believe Trudeau government rhetoric that while climate change poses an imminent, existential threat to humanity, it can be solved by a carbon tax that will make 80% of us richer.



I mean, seriously. Who are these people kidding?

[Anonymous]

If Trudeau implemented a carbon tax as economists recommended, it would not raise the cost of everything and harm economic competitiveness. What Ottawa and the feds are doing is making Canadians poorer.



By Kenneth Green, environment analyst at the Fraser Institute.



Carbon tax well short of textbook design



On Monday, April Fool's Day, the federal carbon tax kicked in, in the four provinces that do not have their own carbon taxes — Ontario, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and New Brunswick.



The federal carbon tax (technically the "federal carbon-pricing backstop") kicks in at $20 per tonne, rising by $10 per year to reach $50/ tonne in 2022 (Alberta's provincial carbon tax is scheduled to rise in lockstep with the federal plan).



Where it will go after that is anyone's guess.



Some economists defend the federal tax, proclaiming it to be "revenue neutral" since some 90% of revenues will be rebated to households in lump-sum payments that somehow will magically actually exceed the carbon taxes paid by households, and thereby the carbon tax will make every Canadian better off.



(But as noted by economist Jack Mintz, when factoring in all the direct and indirect costs of the carbon tax, it's likely impossible that everyone will receive a rebate that exceeds the tax.)



Because there will be lawsuits over federal carbon pricing (and a possible imminent court challenge of Alberta's carbon tax), let's review the necessary attributes of a textbook carbon tax that can justify it's an "efficient" way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.



First, [size=150]economic carbon tax theory doesn't simply call for some arbitrarily defined "revenue neutrality," it calls for carbon tax revenues to be used to reduce other economically distortionary taxes such as personal and corporate income taxes.



That's because reducing those taxes increases economic efficiency overall and offsets the drag introduced by taxing carbon emissions.[/size]



Giving lump-sum rebates to households will not generate those economic gains, therefore, the new carbon tax will simply be yet another drag on Canada's economy.



And revenue neutrality (however defined) has been fleeting in Canada.



In B.C., actual revenue neutrality lasted only five years before carbon tax revenue turned into a new stream of government revenue.



Second, [size=150]economic theory calls for carbon taxes to replace regulation, not be layered on top of regulation.

[/size]

And [size=150]the number of regulations already targeting energy use (and thus carbon emissions) must be phased out as carbon taxes are phased in.[/size]



Do you think the federal or provincial governments will eliminate building efficiency standards, vehicle efficiency standards, household appliance efficiency standards, electronic device efficiency standards, etc.?



Here in Canada, (and nowhere else that we can determine) there has been no regulatory displacement in provinces levying a carbon tax.



Third, [size=150]economists worry about carbon leakage — where firms reorganize or relocate operations to avoid the carbon tax — and competitiveness.



Some economists argue that a border carbon-adjustment system would fix these problems, so imports would face a carbon tax and exports to countries without comparable carbon pricing would be exempt from a carbon tax. But Canada has not done this.[/size]



While the federal carbon tax includes measures to mitigate competitiveness concerns for emission-intensive and trade-exposed industries, the government's approach targets high-emitters, meaning that service and low-emitting manufacturers will pay more in energy costs thanks to the carbon tax.



Finally, importers to Canada will gain the advantage over Canadian producers since the federal plan does not include an import carbon tariff.



[size=150]To make matters worse, exporters who cannot pass their extra carbon costs to world markets will likely see their competiveness wane since the federal carbon-pricing plan doesn't issue export rebates.[/size]



Clearly, despite grandiose promises, as currently designed, the federal carbon tax is nothing like the tax favoured in economic literature.



It's just another tax atop all the rest.



April Fool's indeed.

[Anonymous]

Forcing working families to choose between heating their homes, driving to work or buying more expensive food(transport costs) based on fuzzy math from the reliably unreliable UN is unconscionable.